Commencement Confetti

Medalist Precedent? houseless, during renovation, a communi- Retired Harvard Corporation fellows ty dispersed to swing spaces. Relocating usually receive honorary degrees for the chief marshal’s spread to Widener their service—especially the senior fel- Library (see right) freed that event’s cus- low. But Robert D. Reischauer ’63 (who tomary site, the lawn between Lamont stepped down in 2014, having guided the and Loeb House, for Dunster’s lunchtime epochal reform of University governance diploma ceremony for undergraduates announced in late 2010) was awarded a and their families. Harvard Medal instead (see page 73). Given the Corporation’s enlarged mem- Print Persists bership, the self-effacing, institutionally It may be an electronic era, but at least minded Reischauer one print vestige re- might have sought to mains, and looms large, set another precedent for the College class

by undoing the as- of 2015: the enormous Lattes in the Library? Lamont haw Library has a full café. The renovated

sumption of nearly au- Harvard 379 yearbook, S han ’ central court t tomatic honoraries. He some 528 colorful

can now be rented for catered events Jona is shown at the chief pages, weighing in at (no red wine, no food in the galleries). marshal’s spread, af- 5.5 pounds. (And yes, But the chief marshal’s luncheon in ter the Morning Exer- according to the pro- Widener’s reading room? Nominally, the rationale was to celebrate the cises, with President duction credits, it was library’s centennial. Practically, the Drew Faust and his haw “designed on Apple venue afforded guests an air-condi-

han S han tioned respite. Note to students and living predecessors as t Mac OSX’s, using scholars: in the unlikely event Widener senior fellow, James R. Jona Adobe InDesign CS6” ever opens routinely for food service, Houghton ’58, M.B.A. ’62 (seated), and software—and then published, on ex- insist on the “sliced grilled garlic Charles P. Slichter ’45, Ph.D. ’49 (stand- pensive paper.) thyme encrusted flank steak set on ing to the left)—both doctor of laws chimichurri sauce” served to guests. Dessert was amaretto syllabub—not honorands. Diploma Double-Dipping syllabus. It takes considerable knowledge to read Dunster, Unhoused the meaning of Commencement regalia. Introducing the final honorand,Deval L. Joint-degree candidates are entitled to laureate address, President Drew Faust Patrick ’78, J.D. ’82, Provost Alan Garber two sets of embroidered crow’s-feet on reminded the seniors that during Bos- ’77, Ph.D. ’82, invoked old College ties, the facings of their gowns, one set per ton’s arctic winter, “Harvard shut down recognizing “the seventy-first governor school. Erin Patten, M.B.A.-M.P.P. ’15, of three times in three weeks, tying the to- of the Commonwealth of Massachu- Houston, for instance, sported medium tal number of snow days for the entire setts—and, of at least equal note, a fel- gray for the Business School and peacock twentieth century.” Graduate English low alumnus of ….” The blue for the Kennedy School. orator Anna F. Wang Erickson—about arrison timing was ironic: Dunster is currently to receive a Ph.D. in molecular and cel- Jim H Jim Boston, Today and Tomorrow lular biology—recounted a ride “on the University admissions and develop- M2 shuttle heading back to Cambridge ment officershate talk about Harvard from the medical school. It’s two miles being “old and cold” versus Stanford. away. So during the next 45 minutes on Yet in her Bacca- the bus….” Putting these annoyances in

Silent Protests. In a year marred by the deaths of unarmed black Americans at the hands of police—an issue mentioned most prominently in Deval L. Patrick’s afternoon address—many graduates wore BLACK LIVES MATTER signs on their mortarboards. Advocates of divestment from fossil-fuel investments held in the endowment did not conduct protests during Commencement, but large orange buttons supported that cause—and fiftieth-reunioner Elizabeth (Betty) osner Block ’65, down from Ontario, endorsed other messages of u R

St ambiguous political meaning.

Harvard Magazine 21 Reprinted from . For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ’s Journal • Commencement 2015

“Tiger Cub” Pinned. Yale Law School professors Amy Chua ’84, J.D. ’87, and Jed Rubenfeld, J.D. ’86, attach second lieutenant’s bars to the uniform of their daughter Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld ’15 during the ROTC commissioning ceremony. Chua is known for her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother; she and Rubenfeld are the coauthors of The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, published last year.

perspective, Latin Salutatorian James Degreed P. McGlone, an historian and classicist, Harvard conferred imagined a future traveler coming upon 7,768 degrees and cer- the antique ruins of Harvard, “the statue tificates, according to of John Harvard lying on its back” like the annual news-office

some fallen pharaonic colossus—which compendium: 1,612 arrison

McGlone mimed, not missing a (Latin) from the College, 995 H Jim beat. No one present seemed to associate from the Graduate School of Arts and Sci- soprano Asia Stewart ’18 at least held such upheaval and ruins with an earth- ences (including 583 Ph.D.s), 918 from the her own as the soloist during the Com- quake in, say, Palo Alto. Business School, 762 from the Extension mencement Choir’s rendition of the School (one more than the Law School)… spiritual “This Little Light of Mine.” She Provosts Rock! and so on down to 75 diverse graduates is a member of the Harvard LowKeys, Provost Alan Garber, who has a quick, from the School of Dental Medicine. an a cappella group. At the honorands’ dry sense of humor, had a big day intro- dinner Wednesday evening, Sasha Scol- ducing the honorands at the Morning Swelled Heads Department nik-Brower ’17 performed three move- Exercises. Reeling off Yale presidentPe - As the graduates basked in Crimson glo- ments of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G ter Salovey’s academic posts, he noted, ry, outsiders lauded Harvard on Com- Major—and was congratulated, as he “And, of course, the exalted role of uni- mencement day. The MacArthur Foun- left the stage, by audience member Yo- versity provost.” He also dation reported that College Yo Ma ’76, D.Mus. ’91, likely the world’s worked in a reference to alumni had won 72 of the fel- most acclaimed master of that instru- CS 50, the introductory lowships (so-called “genius ment. But Yale president Peter Salovey, computer-science class, grants”) it awarded between founding bassist of The Professors of Harvard’s largest course, 1981 and 2014—followed by Bluegrass, did not get to strut his stuff; which joins the curriculum Princeton (28), Berkeley (20), the otherwise obscure reference in his in New Haven this fall, and and Yale (19). And the Uni- honorary-degree citation (page 18) had Salovey’s origins as “a na- versity of Oxford announced to suffice.

tive son of Cambridge.” And arrison that Louise Richardson, Alan Garber he paused perfectly after H Jim Ph.D. ’89, would become its Computer $cience “What’s that smell?”—the first line of vice-chancellor (the equivalent of presi- Highly compensated jobs on Wall Street his remarks about Linda B. Buck, who dent). The former executive dean of the and in consulting continue to lure Col- co-discovered the biological mechanism Radcliffe Institute, now principal and lege graduates: one-third of the 760 re- of the olfactory system. When she shared vice-chancellor of the University of St. spondents to The ’s senior the Nobel Prize in 2004, Garber dead- Andrews (whose 600th anniversary she survey are headed to those fields, the panned, “she discovered the sweet smell oversaw), she will be the first woman to highest proportion since 2008. Mean- of success.” lead Oxford, recognized as a universitas while, “47 percent of respondents re- in 1231. porting that they would make $110,000 or more” after graduating were comput- Music-Making er-science concentrators. For compari- After honorand Renée son, families with incomes at that level Fleming sang “America qualify for generous financial aid if their the Beautiful” (page 19), children attend the College.

Senior Reunioners. Three hardy members of the class of 1940 (right to left)—Stanley Geller of New York City (95 and four months), Hobart “Hobie” Lerner of Rochester (two months shy of 96), and Leon “Lee” Starr of Rye, New York (two weeks shy of 97)—gathered at the Tree Spread to celebrate a seventy-fifth reunion convened at their prompting with aid from the HAA. The seventieth reunion is typically the most senior quinquennial gathering, but after Starr, a former Allied Stores executive, and Lerner, an ophthalmologist who retired

arrison last December, inquired separately, and Starr suggested linking their

Jim H Jim celebration with the class of 1945’s, all fell happily into place.

22 July - August 2015 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746